1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to illumination and is more specifically related to surgical illumination devices used during medical examinations and surgical procedures.
2. Description of the Related Art
Ambient illumination is often inadequate for conducting safe and efficacious medical examinations and surgical procedures. Regardless of the intensity of the ambient lighting, shadows cast by medical personnel and/or other objects in a room (e.g., draperies) may prevent proper illumination of an examination site or surgical site. Moreover, when a surgical procedure is conducted inside a body cavity, providing sufficient lighting is even more difficult to achieve.
Illumination devices inserted into body cavities must be safe, reliable, capable of being sterilized, capable of operating with other surgical instruments, and be easy for a physician to manipulate. Critical specification features for such illumination devices typically include the brightness of the light, the amount of heat generated by the light, battery life, the shelf life of the device, ease of use with and without other devices, and affordability. For example, a light source may generate excessive heat that causes tissue damage a patient or injures a member of a medical team. Thus, it is desirable to have an illumination device that efficiently removes heat from the light source to avoid excessive temperatures that may damage tissue or injure medical personnel.
It is also desirable to have an illumination device that is user friendly, and that is capable of being quickly moved, mounted, dismounted, and remounted as needed for safely and efficiently completing medical procedures.
There have been a number of advances in illumination devices used for medical examinations and surgical procedures. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,428,180 to Karram et al. discloses a compact, self-powered, selectively-mountable lighting unit that provides light directable by a user to an operation site in a confined space to enable the user to operate a tool therein. The lighting unit is detachably mountable in a variety of ways either to a user-selected location on any suitable surgical instrument, or at the user's option to an adjacent location within the confined space, to facilitate well-lit and accurate viewing thereat. The lighting unit may be adapted to provide lighting of selected frequency, in an adjustable focus ranging from substantially diffuse light to a tightly focused beam. The lighting unit is designed to be mounted to surgical tools that are not specifically designed to be attached to lighting units.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,270,439 to Horrell et al. discloses a compact, self-contained lighting system that is attachable to a surgical tool to enable a user to selectively direct light at a site where the tool is to be applied. The system has a power unit that contains a power cell, a malleable electrical connection element, and a light-emitting element powered thereby to emit high intensity white light. The system ensures against tissue damage due to inadvertent overheating by continuously removing byproduct heat from the light-emitting element, via the connection element, to the power unit with portions of each of these components serving as respective heat sinks and/or as thermal conduits to facilitate this process. The removed heat is transferred in a proximal direction to a heat sink located in the handle part of the device.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2008/0266840 discloses an illumination device having an electrically powered LED light source, a flexible boom having a first end on which the LED is mounted, a housing attached to a second end of the flexible boom opposite to the first end, an electric battery located within the housing, the battery being operatively associated with the LED for providing power thereto, a controller electrically connected to the battery and the LED for controlling the electrical power provided to the LED, and a switch mounted on the device and in communication with the controller so as to provide a signal to the controller when the switch is actuated. The controller is actuated by the switch to control the electrical power to the LED light source for turning the LED on and off.
In spite of the above advances, there remains a need for improved surgical illumination devices that have small cross-sectional footprints at the distal ends of the devices for being minimally invasive during medical examinations and surgical procedures. There also remains a need for surgical illumination devices that efficiently remove heat from the light sources at the distal ends of the devices so as to avoid tissue damage and/or problems associated with excessive heat. In addition, there remains a need for surgical illumination devices that may be coupled to a broad array of surgical tools to provide reliable illumination at examination sites and surgical sites. Moreover, there remains a need for surgical illumination devices that are versatile and that may be used in a broad range of surgical environments.